What Causes Disease
Hi, my name’s Liz Geran and I’m an acupuncturist and Chinese herbalist at Jade mountain wellness. And prior to becoming an acupuncturist, I was an occupational therapist for 18 years. So lots of experience in medicine and healing. So today I’m going to talk about the internal and external causes of diseases from a Chinese medical point of view.
So we’re going to start with external causes. So external causes are anything that one gets from the environment. And usually, this happens because somebody’s energy or their Che is deficient. So, external causes would be like somebody who comes in with arthritis in their hip. Usually, you can ask somebody if it, if it’s worse, if it’s stamped out or if it’s hot out or if it’s cold out. So this is what I mean by the environment comes in and you get it’s an external cause of the disease.
So as I said, external causes are always from Che deficiency. It’s the same thing like if you would catch a cold or flu, that’s an external cause your Che was not strong enough. And so you catch something that’s going around, maybe it’s at work or at school. So this is the reason why you know, during cold or flu season in the winter, why some people will get a cold and flu and others won’t actually get a cold or flu. If you’re Che deficient, you might get the cold or flu and somebody else wouldn’t, who’s not Che deficient.
Now we’re going to look at internal causes of diseases. So Chinese medicine is 4,000 years old. And originally in the older history of Chinese medicine, they spent a lot more time treating external causes of diseases because people didn’t live so long. So people usually live till they’re 40 like you know, even in the late 18 hundreds or the middle 18 hundreds, a lot of people like didn’t live quite as long as we’re living now.
So most diseases that were, that were treated from an acupuncture herbal point of view or external were caused by external conditions. Now, as we’re moving into current times, people are living so much longer that internal causes of diseases are becoming much more prevalent. So chronic degenerative diseases, this is what we’re looking at with internal causes of diseases.
So internal causes of diseases are from the mind and the emotions. Okay. Now our emotions, typically aren’t an issue. It’s actually what the mind thinks about the emotions. How the mind thinks about it, the frequency that the mind thinks about things. So the mind and the emotions.
So what I, then I’m going to distill down and talk a little bit just about the mind. So a lot of people spend a lot of time in their head thinking and in Chinese medicine, the appropriate time for thinking is when you’re actually coming up with a solution to something.
So in my work, day to day, when I’m doing acupuncture or herbs, the time that I am allowed to think, and that I think is if I’m coming up with an herbal formula, I write the earth formula down, I mix it up. I give it to somebody, that’s it. That’s the end of the thought. Or if I’m coming up with an acupuncture treatment, I think about it. I do it. It’s done.
Now, if I would spend time thinking about those things over and over and over again, that simple act is going to cause disease in the body, mind, and spirit. So body, mind, spirit is the same word in Chinese medicine. So anything that affects your body is going to affect your spirit is going to affect your mind.
Okay. So, so what we’re looking at is rumination, we’re looking about at, instead of being in the present moment, thinking about either the past or the future, and actually spending so much of your time in your mind in the past or the future that you’re actually, don’t not just in the present moment. So those are my ideas about internal and external diseases.